In Episode 5 on SemioBytes, Terry asks me about my trip to Israel. I traveled to Israel as part of a new program from Birthright Taglit for adults that missed out the first time around. This new group is for individuals 27-32 years old. More information is available on Birthright’s website.
In this episode, Terry leads with a conversation regarding science, religion, philosophy, and the signs of the end times. This longer episode connects directly with Terry’s dissertation and brings to point a conversation about what are we doing, as Jews and Christians, to help or hinder tikkun olam and prepare for a “messianic” era.
In this week’s episode, Terry and I discussed our takeaways from our joint interview with Dr. Leonard Sweet at his resort in Orcas Island. We conducted our interview the last week of May 2018 during our face to face intensive to finish our cohort DMin program with the last of our classes with Len. He…
In many ways, this is a tale as old as time. Imagery found in the Torah, true as it can be. A prophet takes the center stage, barely prepared for the raw power he faces off against.
“And He said, ‘Let there be light;’ and there was light. G-d saw that the light was good, and G-d separated the light from the darkness. G-d called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day.”
Terry Rankin and I are co-hosts for an exciting (well at least to us) podblog experiment. The pod is the podcast, SemioBytes, which features the both of us, head-to-head, toe-to-toe, looking at things from his Christian and my (Orthodox) Jewish point of view. It’ll be interesting to say the least. The blog component is our…
Counting the Omer is not just a mitzvah, but is a mitzvah based in Kabbalah. We are instructed to count the Omer, but what are we counting? Why count 49 days of the Omer at all?
Are you in sync with your life? A core Jewish concept is the inner goodness of mankind. While there is an evil inclination, mankind is intrinsically good and pure. Otherwise, how could HaShem ask us to be holy before showing us how?
The Torah is full of metaphor, and in some cases, a metaphor of itself (sounds meta, right?). Being able to see these metaphors and apply them is to go beyond the first level of Torah interpretation. There are four levels of interpreting Scripture: PaRDeS.
HaShem gives the Jewish nation the instructions of building the Mishkan as well as the Ark of the Covenant in Parashat Terumah. We have already discussed the Ark of the Covenant, so now let’s look at a different semiotic nugget buried in the text.
In Parashat Terumah, we come across the construction of the Ark of the Covenant, which is semiotically rich with allusion and importance.
